A. The Field of the Invention
This invention relates to the field of computer systems for providing information. In particular, the invention relates to an expandable server for efficiently providing information to clients based on selection criteria.
B. Background Information
Product advertisements in media such as newspaper and television have the advantage of reaching many people. At the same time, these forms of advertisement are indiscriminate and may reach many people who are not interested in the product advertised.
An advertisement is more effective when it can be targeted to a specific market so consumers in that market will be more likely to be interested in the product advertised. For example, advertisements for fishing equipment will be more effective when placed in a fishing magazine. The benefit to the consumers is that they are presented with advertisements that they will find much more useful.
On the World Wide Web (or web), advertisers can target specific markets with more discrimination than other media. The information presented to the user is dynamically generated so advertisers can select an appropriate advertisement in real time for that specific user. Thus, the manner in which content is presented on the web means that advertisers can reach increasingly defined segments of the market. For example, a high percentage of people who access a stock quotes web page may be interested in a stock broker. A stock broker who places an advertisement on this web page may reach a smaller group of people, but a much higher percentage of this group will be potential customers. This is in stark contrast to other media such as newspaper and television, in which the target market may only be a small percentage of the total market reached.
Other media, including emerging and developing technologies such as on-demand television, will also give advertisers similar ability to target specific markets.
To take advantage of this ability to target specific markets on the web, advertisers often estimate a user's interests using a variety of profiling techniques. These profiling techniques can help an advertiser to select an advertisement to present to the user. Current profiling techniques use a combination of demographic, geographic, psychographic, collaborative filtering, digital identification, and hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) information. The user typically has to enter information about that user, and then the media server uses that information to determine an appropriate advertisement. However, the types of information that are being used by advertisers are constantly changing. Advertisers want a flexible system that will allow them to select various sets of criteria for selecting appropriate advertisements.
Additionally, the selection process has to work in real time. An example of the problem is a user should not have to wait for a web page because the server is still trying to determine an appropriate advertisement.
Additionally, the selection process should be independent of the type of media being served. The system should be flexible enough to serve any type of media e.g., text advertisement, video spot, or Java applet, to any type of dynamically generated information such as a web page, interactive television, etc.
Therefore, what is desired is a flexible, fast, media selection and presentation system.